Press Release

Spanierman Gallery at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on December 1, 2007, of Gallery Selections, an exhibition and sale of works by American artists working after World War II, whose art explores various aspects of abstraction. The show includes examples by Dan Christensen, Eugene Dana, Jasmina Danowski, Gene Davis, Jimmy Ernst, Meghan Gerety, Teo Gonzalez, Gary Komarin, Sol LeWitt, Clifford Smith, and Pam Sztzbel. As the list of artists represented in the exhibition demonstrates, abstraction has had a long legacy in America .

The pioneering Conceptual and Minimal artist Sol LeWitt is represented in a drawing reflecting his perpetual study of modular structures, while the heritage of LeWitt, who died last April, is continued in the art of the Spanish-born Brooklyn resident Teo Gonzalez, whose gridded arrangements are deceptively simply, seemingly logical yet filled with a richness of mysterious suggestion.

A special emphasis of the show is on the work of the little-known artist Eugene Dana, a noted art teacher, whose early contact with Josef Albers and other leading Post-Painterly Abstractionists provided a basis for his original and pristine geometric abstractions that are suggestive of kinetic prisms.

Other manifestations of abstraction range from the systematic studies of scale and color relations demonstrated in the hard-edge images of Gene Davis, who was part of the Washington Color Painters along with Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, to the dynamic explorations of the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and pictorial form in the art of Dan Christensen, which was praised by Clement Greenberg in the 1960s for his powerful and shimmering surfaces, often created through his use of a spray paint gun.

The lyricism reflected in Christensen's One O'clock Jump (1979) also emerges in Jasmina Danowski's PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT (2007), in which, in her depiction of airy and liquid red forms, suggestive of blood cells, the artist conveys a reminiscence of her subject matter by evoking sensations of it rather than by a literal representation. Other artists who use abstract form to probe psychological and personal realms include Gary Komarin who combines an elemental formal language with the suggestion of ordinary objects—some the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, and others emanating from his memories and past—and Meghan Gerety, whose large monochromatic drawings in graphite and watercolor, based on photographs, elicit our awareness of how we project our fantasies onto the landscape around us.

Clifford Smith and Pam Sztybel, whose work is located in Gallery A, explore metaphysical aspects of seeing and of experience, the personal engagement of the viewer playing as significant a role in their works as the presentation of their subject matter.

Jimmy Ernst, the son of the Surrealist Max Ernst, is included in the show with three works from his Sea of Grass series from the early 1980s. In these images, horizontal bands referring to natural forms evoke the landscapes near Ernst's studios in East Hampton and the Florida Everglades.